In what turned out to be my final session, I visited an intriguing talk by Robert Landau from the Liger Learning Centre in Cambodia and Tim Carr - Head of Jakarta International School.
Their message - to a crowded room - was that schools need to be pioneers, that we need to look ahead to an education system in the year 2030, and start building towards that today. Robert's journey is a fascinating one, and his learning centre is reaching out to the local community in ways that I had never imagined. Tim runs a school that is much more in keeping with GIS, and was at pains to point out - as Greg Whitby before him - that it is vital to simplify when attempting to instigate change. For example, at JIS they did not have a large planning meeting when looking to the future of the education that they facilitate; instead that held what they called a Dream Summit. Out of this summit came 5 summit dreams whose purpose is to drive forward the future of the school. What a nice approach. How nice also that amongst their cornerstones you find the words 'balance' and 'fun'.
Tim and Robert both repeatedly came back to the idea of trusting and enabling your staff through coaching and mentoring, of flattening structures, and at JIS of crunched cycles of activity. They also noted that in order to implement wide scale and meaningful change, you need to bring your staff with you along the journey. And human beings respond better to things being described to them, rather than things being measured.
The final message that I took from this, and indeed took from Earcos itself, was something that Robert signed off with:
Simplify, clarify, hold hands and leap.
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